…c/o Dina:
Jack and Jill went up the hill
to fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down, and broke his crown,
and nobody came tumbling after.
Me: Where was Jill?
Dina: She went home.
Me: Why?
Dina: Because she didn’t see Jack fall.
Me: So what’s going to happen to him?
Dina: He’s going to die.
Yes. Yosef and I have been watching old foreign films, like “Breathless” and “Wild Strawberries”. In fact, “Wild Strawberries” was my first Bergman film ever, I think. And unlike when I saw “La Strada” and thought to myself “Uh, was I supposed to like that or risk being thought uncivilized?” (a question my college boyfriend answered for me when I mistakenly thought our relationship was built on enough honesty for me to ask it out loud; the answer, in case you were wondering, is “yes”. In fact, he spent most of our relationship acting like he liked things that would make him appear very cultured, like “Der Fledermaus” and Nat Sherman cigarettes; I think he almost threw up on me when I admitted that, while I appreciated the Marx Brothers, I didn’t laugh out loud to all the jokes in “Duck Soup”. Now, where was I…?), I actually loved this film. I can see why Woody Allen loves Bergman, too, what with all the self-absorbed and tortured characters and flashbacks to equally uneventful, self-absorbed, and tortured childhoods. Bergman shows that you needn’t live through extraordinary times or events to have lived a life worth consideration.
Also, Bibi Andersson is an awesome actress (yb and I had no clue she played both “Sara” characters), and she’s the quintessential hot Swedish girl.
Wow; I think Christopher Hitchens is the first person to ever hypothesize that most funny women are “hefty or dykey or Jewish”. Honestly, there is very little new information in this article. Why write it, then, you ask? I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with Christopher Hitchens being an attention-starved, controversy-whore. This coming from a female comedian…
Me: (pointing to a picture of The Beatles in The New Yorker) Hey, Dina, look, it’s The Beatles.
Dina: Why aren’t they mermaids?
Me: Why would you think they’d be mermaids?
Dina: You know, cuz when they sing; they’re, like, pure, and, like, energy…
Me: And you think that would translate to them being mermaids?
Dina; (slightly sheepishly, due to the realization that these criteria do not, although they should, make people mermaids) Yeah…
Epilogue: When fact checking w/ Dina before posting this story, she claimed that what she said was that they were “elastic energy”. I think she added that just now, but it’s a good revision. I’ll leave it to you to decide which version you disseminate to the people in your life who are not AF readers, but eager await the updates that you provide to them.
No, seriously, This movie rocked. It’s like an awesome mobster movie tucked inside a lesbian seduction film. There’s some scenes that are just so well shot, you think how they really belong in an even more epic film (like Caesar grabbing a dead mobster by the lapels and demanding he answer the question “Who’s dead now?”, and a beautiful slow mo of a bullet hitting a glass picture frame). Then, if, like me, you were forbidden to read the case before watching the film, you see in the credits that this is a wachowski brothers film, and it all makes sense. And then you picture them during filming, saying “Dude, we need some slow mo shots in there. Look! We don’t know why! It’ll just be better that way, trust us! More slow mo!!!!!!”
